Corre on McLaren

People have so many stories to tell about my dad, and some of them are not the nicest, but even his detractors would have to admit that he changed their lives. He changed the world, man. He shook it all up with punk, not just musically but socially and politically.

If you look back at the reaction to the Sex Pistols at the time, you can see that. People were threatened by what they stood for. It's the last time music had that power. He was a revolutionary really. People say: "Oh, it was all about the music, the band." No it wasn't. It was about a revolutionary idea.

I know John Lydon was pissed off with the notion that Malcolm somehow created him, and that's fair enough; no one created John but John. But Malcolm did create the name, the look and the big adventure that was the Sex Pistols. He was the catalyst. His real good fortune was finding my mum (Vivienne Westwood) as a partner-in-crime, someone who believed in him and his ideas. She would have done anything for him, and him for her. Together, they were unstoppable: his ideas, her designs. I know they had problems, but I spoke to her last night and she only had good things to say.

We had a difficult relationship, but it was all right in the end. I went to Switzerland and we said what we had to say and we made our peace. I'm really glad I did that. It was such a release – for both of us.

It was hard for me because he never wanted to do the emotional stuff that comes with being a parent. He ran away from it and I found that hard to take. But, you know, he had a messed-up upbringing and he just didn't know how to do it. His mother rejected him so he was brought up by his grandmother, who was a lunatic really. She shaped his whole world view. She had him reading Jane Eyre by the time he was five or six. He told us he only went to school for one day in his entire childhood. They gave him a Peter & Jane book to read and he thought they were imbeciles. That was that. So he never learned the social and survival skills you learn in the playground. He made up his own rules, his own way of doing things.

He had a huge issue with his mother's rejection. He once ended up in a home for a few days because he'd been sick in hospital and no one had come to claim him. Mad stuff like that. He told me that he had got on the tube once and ended up sitting opposite his mother. He got off without saying a word to her. Sad, really.

I think he was damaged and I'm a bit damaged in turn, but it makes you strong. It's like your weakness and your force. You drive yourself on to prove yourself. If he hadn't been messed up as a child, would he have created punk?

My best memories of my dad are all chaotic but brilliant. The best thing was when he made up these wonderful adventure stories for Ben (Corre's half-brother) and me. I used to hate it when they ended.

I remember when, after the Sex Pistols swore on the Bill Grundy TV show, we were barricaded in our flat with the National Front trying to smash our windows. I don't remember being terrified. We were together as a family and it was exciting in a way.

I'm going to miss him. He went through some bad stuff at the end, but he was tough. And he kept his spirits up. My brother had this T-shirt on that said "Free Leonard Peltier" – he's that Native American political prisoner of conscience. Malcolm looked at the T-shirt and said, "Yeah – Free Leonard Peltier". It was one of the last things he said. Just great.

He wanted to be buried in Highgate cemetery. Quite right too. I'm organising that. I'm going to have to think about the farewell party too. Maybe a boat trip down the Thames in memory of the Pistols' Jubilee bash. We'll need a fleet this time, though.

Joe Corre was talking to Sean O'Hagan

Temple on McLaren

It takes a lot these days to stay up all night listening to Never Mind the Bollocks, but that's what I, and many others, needed to do on Thursday night when we learned that Malcolm had died. It's strange, but when something that sad and unexpected happens, all the good memories of someone seem to rush to the surface and the not so good ones fade.

Malcolm was an incredible catalyst for my generation. To be in the same room as him in 1976 was to be bombarded with energy and swept up in a rush of ideas and emotions.

His assault on the last bastions of Victorian morality completed the process that began in the 50s and 60s and liberated us all. He made ugly beautiful and revealed how bloated, complacent and out of touch the music industry had become. But his impact was not limited to music alone. Right across the creative spectrum Malcolm made young people – artists, designers, writers, film-makers – aware that they had a distinctive voice and encouraged them to use it right there and then.

One of my strongest memories of Malcolm is watching him reduce Richard Branson to tears by refusing to allow him to invest in my film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Most producers would have jumped at the chance of financing for their film, but Malcolm took a perverse delight in watching a grown man blubber and grovel in front of him. That was more important to him than any bin liner stuffed with cash.

After more than 30 years, nothing – not even early hip-hop or the rave summer of 1989 – has gone beyond his unflinching vision of punk rock in terms of attitude and the ability to confront the dominant mainstream culture. But that kind of greatness can come with a downside.

He could be inspirational but was often disloyal and delusional too. The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle was conceived at the height of the Pistols' fame as a deliberate provocation, designed to incense and confuse all those Sex Pistols fans who had begun to kneel down beneath posters of the band on their bedroom walls. The point of the Pistols was to destroy that culture of celebrity subservience and inspire kids to get up and do it themselves.

So we wrote a version of the story, inspired by Orson Welles's F For Fake and Jean-Luc Godard, which turned fact and fiction upside down. We made Malcolm the ultimate Svengali figure and turned the band into his willing puppets. Increasingly, though, Malcolm began to believe in the myths of his own creation. His insistence on seeing the Pistols as no more than the urinal to his Duchamp became more pronounced over the years and in the end was offensive.

At the height of his powers Malcolm was surrounded by an incredibly creative group of people, not just the Sex Pistols themselves, but the extraordinary talents of Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid among many others. Somehow he conspired to blow all that and alienate pretty much everybody in the process. What seemed a glamorous and subversive act at the time seems perhaps more tragic now. When the Sex Pistols finally imploded, there was blood all over the walls and maybe some pieces of brain too. The fallout was extreme, culminating in the tragic death of Sid Vicious, which cast a long shadow over Malcolm's later career.

But none of this can take away from his brilliance at that time. The Malcolm I knew saw art as a provocation and himself as an agent provocateur. In that sense it's great that his son, Joe, is carrying on his work. He saw himself as a con artist with the emphasis on the latter word.

He saw the front pages of the daily newspapers as a blank canvas on which to create havoc. Without him there would be no split sheep or unmade bed, no Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin, who carried on his sense of mischievous subversion. He was also the first spin doctor. He seemed to have his finger on an invisible button, hardwired into the brains of the Fleet Street editors, driving them into an apoplectic frenzy of rage each time he chose to push it.

On a personal note, although I worked intensely with Malcolm for only a short period of time and managed to fall out with him pretty spectacularly too, the creative ideas he instilled in me have lasted a lifetime. Malcolm was not trapped in punk. He still had a lot up his sleeve. He would have made a brilliant mayor of London and was planning new schemes to provoke and amuse us right up until the end. Where Simon Cowell exists to homogenise and close things down, Malcolm was there to blow them open and liberate our potential as human beings. Strangely we need him now more than ever.

John Lydon was right when he said Malcolm should be remembered as an entertainer. He was a great showman, shaman and humorist too. Somehow I think I can hear him cackling now, laughing at us as we write and read all these pieces about him.